In silver halide color photographic materials, it is well known that aromatic primary amine type color developing agents oxidized by exposed silver halide which acts as a oxidizing agent react with couplers to form indophenol, indoaniline, indamine, azomethine, phenoxazine, phenazine, and their related dyes, thus forming color images. The subtractive process is used for such a photographic system, and color images are formed by yellow, magenta, and cyan dyes. Among these color images, to form cyan color images, phenol or naphthol type couplers have been hitherto employed in general. However, these couplers have the serious disadvantage of markedly lowering color reproduction, because of unfavorable absorption thereof in the green region.
Couplers for solving the problem, pyrrolotriazoles, have been proposed in EP-A-491197, EP-A-488248 and EP-A-545300. In addition to excellent hues of dyes formed by coupling with oxidized color developing agents, the couplers feature high coupling activity and high molar absorption coefficients of the dyes formed (about 2 to 3 times that of the dyes formed from the phenol or naphthol type couplers). However, the use of the pyrrolotriazoles described in these specifications results in a deterioration in graininess and sharpness. Particularly, the pyrrolotriazoles have the disadvantage of lowering sensitivity in the processing of color reversal in which color development is carried out after black-and-white development. These problems have been expected to be solved.